As economic inequalities have skyrocketed in the United States, scholars have started paying more attention to the individual political activities of billionaires and multimillionaires. Useful as such work may be, it misses an important aspect of plutocratic influence: the sustained efforts of organized groups and networks of political mega-donors, who work together over many years between as well as during elections to reshape politics. Our work contributes to this new direction by focusing on two formally organized consortia of wealthy donors that have recently evolved into highly consequential forces in U.S. politics. We develop this concept and illustrate the importance of organized donor consortia by presenting original data and analyses of the right-wing Koch seminars (from 2003 to the present) and the progressive left-leaning Democracy Alliance (from 2005 to the present). We describe the evolution, memberships, and organizational routines of these two wealthy donor collectives, and explore the ways in which each has sought to reconfigure and bolster kindred arrays of think tanks, advocacy groups, and constituency efforts operating at the edges of America's two major political parties in a period of intensifying ideological polarization and growing conflict over the role of government in addressing rising economic inequality. Our analysis argues that the rules and organizational characteristics of donor consortia shape their resource allocations and impact, above and beyond the individual characteristics of their wealthy members.

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When Political Mega-Donors Join Forces: How the Koch Network and the Democracy Alliance Influence Organized U.S. Politics on the Right and Left

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When Political Mega-Donors Join Forces: How the Koch Network and the Democracy Alliance Influence Organized U.S. Politics on the Right and Left

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2. For initial investigations, see Hassell, Hans J. G., “Party Control of Party Primaries: Party Influence in Nominations for the U.S. Senate,” Journal of Politics78, no. 1 (2016): 75–87; Jake M. Grumbach, “Campaign Contributions and the Extended Networks of Activist Groups” (unpublished paper, Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, 2016).

3. Democracy Alliance, “Membership Benefits and Participation Options,” Washington, DC: The Democracy Alliance. (Handout obtained by the authors from the Democracy Alliance; shown in full in Appendix C.)

5. See the lists of twice-yearly Koch and DA meetings in Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Theda Skocpol, and Jason Sclar, “When Wealthy Political Contributors Join Forces: U.S. Donor Consortia on the Left and Right” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, PA, September 2016).

12. Recently, both the DA and the Koch seminars have set up websites and released a bit more public information about their activities and meetings. The Koch seminars now invite selected reporters to attend the opening sessions of their twice-yearly conferences, on condition that they not release the names of donor attendees who do not want to be identified. But transparency remains strictly limited for both organizations—and neither of them publishes their membership or provides a full historical record of their evolving activities.

28. See http://seminarnetwork.org. In this and other public-facing presentations, the Koch network splashes pictures of ordinary Americans from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds to present itself, and especially AFP, as a “grassroots” endeavor. Little to no information is provided about the authoritative, centralized structure and direction of the network or about the very wealthy donors who sustain it. In actuality, the Koch network is not democratically governed; it is structured like a private investment corporation and an ideological cadre-led political party. To attract donors, it issues confidential documents like the Americans for Prosperity Partner Prospectus: January 2017 (Arlington, VA: Americans for Prosperity; available as a leaked document at https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3457972-Americans-for-Prosperity-Partner-Prospectus.html).

38. For many of the twists and turns, see ibid., and Vogel, Kenneth P., Big Money: 2.5 Billion Dollars, One Suspicious Vehicle, and a Pimp—On the Trail of the Ultra-Rich Hijacking American Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2014).

39. Democracy Alliance, The Democracy Alliance Portfolio Summaries [included in confidential partner materials for Fall 2007 conference on The Progressive Equation]; see also Figure 7 in a later section of this article.

40. Gara LaMarche, “Democracy Alliance 2020 Vision” (presented at Democracy Alliance Portfolio Snapshot: Spring 2014 [conference], Chicago, IL, April 27–30, 2014). This is an overview of Democracy Alliance development and planning for next steps, presented to Democracy Alliance partners at their investment conference. A version with full financial details is available through a link at Markay, “Exclusive,” published by the Washington Free Beacon.

48. A more complete analysis of the full run of DA conferences, using all of the programs except one in 2006 that has not been located, appears in Vanessa Williamson, Curtlyn Kramer, and Theda Skocpol, “Wealthy Progressive Donors and the Shifting Organizational Terrain of American Politics: The Impact of the Democracy Alliance, 2005 to 2016” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, April 2017).

64. Adam Bonica and Howard Rosenthal, “The Wealth Elasticity of Political Contributions by the Forbes 400” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, April 2015).

65. This landmark argument is developed in Lloyd A. Free and Hadley Cantril, The Political Beliefs of Americans: A Study of Public Opinion (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press).

69. Peter Stone, “How a Network Led by the Billionaire Koch Brothers Is Riding the Trump Wave,” The Guardian, December 7, 2016.

70. Bai, The Argument, afterword.

71. See Rufer, “End This Corporate Welfare.”

72. Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement.

73. Deason and Deason, “What Do the Koch Brothers Want?” This op-ed was also cosigned by other wealthy Dallas Koch seminar members, namely, Thomas O. Hicks, Thomas Hicks Jr., Elaine Marshall, E. Pierce Marshall Jr., Sally and Forrest Hoglund, Tandy and Lee Roy Mitchell, and Gayla and Jim Von Ehr, who all said they could be reached through the Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, “an organization they support and that organized the Koch brothers’ recent gathering.”

74. The feistiness of wealthy Koch donors who resent being criticized by the left and have decided to “stand up” for what they believe comes through splendidly in O'Connor, “Donors Who Fund Koch Brothers’ Causes Say They're Tired of Being ‘Demonized.’” This article provides a glimpse into social ties and moral solidarity that make the Koch seminars an excellent example of the sort of elite social movement sociologist Isaac Martin featured in his book Rich People's Movements.

82. We see the grassroots and elite reactions as somewhat separate, although both aimed to push the GOP. On the Tea Party, see Skocpol, Theda and Williamson, Vanessa, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

83. Perhaps most notable is the rigorous postmortem on the 2012 election that the Kochs commissioned to “re-examine our vision and the strategies and capabilities required for success.” See Paige Lavender, “Koch Brothers Postpone Post-Election Meeting,” Huffington Post, December 11, 2012, available at https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/11/koch-brothers-_n_2277700.html.

94.Hertel-Fernandez, Alexander, Skocpol, Theda, and Lynch, Daniel, “Business Associations, Conservative Networks, and the Ongoing Republican War over Medicaid Expansion,” Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law41 no. 2 (2016), 239–86. Along the line of the work of Frank Baumgartner and his colleagues—Baumgartner, Frank R., Berry, Jeffrey M., Hojnacki, Marie, Kimball, David C. and Leech, Beth L., Lobbying and Policy Change: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009)—a counterargument could be made that it is always easier for lobbying groups to block legislative steps than to pass new ones. This is true, but the Medicaid expansion struggle was not just about whether GOP-dominated state legislatures would enact bills to expand a social benefit Democrats wanted. It was also about whether ultra-conservative groups could keep other conservatives, usually business groups led by GOP governors, from accepting hundreds of millions to billions of dollars of incremental money from the federal government. Political scientists usually expect massive amounts of fiscally flexible money to carry the day, especially for state governments that must balance budgets annually. That had certainly been the norm in the Medicaid program in the past; see, e.g., Thompson, Frank J., Medicaid Politics: Federalism, Policy Durability, and Health Reform (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2012).

95.Kirsch, Richard, Fighting for Our Health: The Epic Battle to Make Health Care a Right in the United States (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012), chap. 3.

98. Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Vanessa Williamson, and Theda Skocpol, “Elite Donor Consortia and the Shifting Landscape of U.S. Political Organizations” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, CA, August 2017), 30–49.

99. Steven Teles, “Organizational Maintenance, The Funder-Grantee Nexus, and the Trajectory of American Political Development” (paper presented at Conference Honoring the Life and Work of James Q. Wilson, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, April 4, 2013).

100. See, e.g., Bartels, Larry M., Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016); Page, Benjamin I. and Gilens, Martin, Democracy in America? What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do About It (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018).